Inflation forecast to peak at over 7% this year. Energy costs increasing by hundreds of pounds. The worst of the rising cost of the weekly shop ‘yet to come’. Real household incomes to fall by an average of £1,000 by the end of 2022. A tax rise on working people. Cuts to the lifeline of Universal Credit. With every passing day the pressure of the cost of living crisis mounts, and the perilous reality for working people becomes clearer.

At the same time, less than 25% of workers in the United Kingdom are members of a trade union. Despite modest growth in public sector representation in the last few years, there has been a significant decline of membership among private sector workers. The fact that working people face this crisis while the trade union movement faces its own is no coincidence. The fortunes of our unions and workers—whether members or not—remain indelibly tied and the future will not look brighter for either until we rebuild an understanding of collectivism in every workplace across the country.

In asserting itself as the voice of all workers in the coming weeks, the trade union movement not only has the chance to thrust itself to the forefront of the national debate—it can also start to rebuild. Because if one thing is for certain, it is that the working lives of millions of people across this country are under threat; they cannot afford more dither or delay. Empowerment is needed now more than ever, from local branches to national leadership.

As working people are warned that they are about to suffer the biggest fall in living standards since comparable records began three decades ago, the package of support measures announced by Chancellor Rishi Sunak fell laughably short. Compare the Tory loan package in response to the energy price hike with the French government’s decision to force EDF Energy, the state operator, to take a £7 billion hit and limit energy bill hikes to 4%. How have we come to accept so little from our political class? When did we come to see this perpetual decline in our quality of life as normality?

But it isn’t only the government. The Labour Party’s continued attack on public ownership is almost as pathetic. And it was accompanied by a failure this weekend to commit to supporting significant pay rises for private sector workers. It is abundantly clear that the current Labour leadership won’t fight for workers when it comes to the cost of living crisis. It falls to trade unions to lead, and we have to step up. No politician is going to do it for us, we have to organise the change ourselves.

The immediate question, then, for all of us in the trade union movement is how to respond. We need to reach out to our own members and the wider public with a message of change that demonstrates the power of a collective voice. There can be no timid response to the Governor of the Bank of England calling for workers to moderate their demands on pay. Any apprehension on our side will simply strengthen the hand of those who wish to push the cost of this crisis onto those who should not be paying for it—workers who sacrificed during the pandemic and have already experienced the longest pay freeze in more than a century.

We must pull every lever we have, whether that be utilising effective communications, playing our part in targeted demonstrations over cost of living issues, or most importantly, organising and supporting industrial action. Whatever form the action takes, trade unions must be at the forefront of mobilising people in the coming weeks and months. This won’t be a short crisis. We need to see a greater level of cooperation and engagement between unions than we have seen before to galvanise an industrial and political effort against this latest attack on working people.

But there is also a deeper question behind our response to this crisis. The decline of trade union membership is nothing new to any of us and while we have been talking up the seriousness of the problem that we face, we have been losing ground. In the private sector at least, when there has never been a greater need for trade union representation, we have never spoken for fewer people in work. This is an urgent challenge to our movement; one that we will either rise to or wither as a force in society.

Despite near-universal acknowledgement of this fact for more than a decade, little has changed in terms of how we approach organising or recruitment. Though much is written about isolated examples of membership gains (encouraging though they may be) we are yet to see sustained breakthroughs. The threat posed by the cost of living crisis must force our movement to adapt to the changing circumstances of our own workers; that is the only path back to growth for trade unions. We remain too far behind on digital organising and our movement’s overall lack of engagement with young workers is clearly hampering our ability to grow.

A campaign over the cost of living crisis won’t solve these problems overnight. But, if it has support for industrial action at its heart, it can begin to turn the tide. And we have no alternative: this is a moment when workers desperately need a trade union movement that fights back, and if that is not how we are seen then it will be remembered. In combination with building strong union branches, training and supporting activists and developing reps, and supporting a vibrant rank and file industrial base our unions can look forward towards a future where we are seen as relevant to both our current members and those that we are currently unknown to.

In seeing trade unionism within its widest possible context, as CWU’s general secretary Dave Ward has argued, in pushing towards a New Deal for Workers campaign, we can rebuild the spirit of collectivism from the platform that has been provided by all key workers who have sacrificed so much throughout the pandemic.

Failure to fight for them now, with everything we have, will make our decline terminal. Our task is to step out of our comfort zones and build a trade union movement that is fit to serve the members that we represent and those that we seek to represent. Workers are fed up. They are ready to fight, if we fail to stand with them, we will have only ourselves to blame.